About the size of a high school’s Parent-Teacher Association directory, Hillis says that the heft of the book makes the online community of the time seem “deceptively large.”

“There’s actually only about 20 people on each page — because we have the name, address and telephone number of each person,” says Hillis, thumbing through it. “And everyone’s listed twice because they’re there once by name and once by email address.”

He continues, “There were only two other Dannys on the internet then. I knew them both.”

When Hillis picked his domain name, Think.com, the only options that were taken were BBN.com and Symbolics.com. It occurred to Hillis to make some additional selections, but he felt that would violate the take-only-what-you-need ethos that permeated the internet then.

Danny Hillis: Back to the future (of 1994)
“I thought, ‘There’s some really interesting names out there. Maybe I should register a few extras just in case.’ But then I thought, ‘Nah, that wouldn’t be very nice,’” he remembers. “That basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network. There was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things.”

Hillis’ point is that trust was built into the technical protocol of the internet. While that was fine when it existed on a small scale, now it includes billions of users and an unquanitifiable amount of machinery and infrastructure. The entire system isn’t just vulnerable to attack — it’s even vulnerable to mistakes. To hear why Hillis thinks we’re setting ourselves up for a disaster, perhaps one even bigger than the financial meltdown, watch this talk. It’s a bold call for us to make a backup system should the Internet crash. A must-see for anyone who has hopped online today. Which, naturally, includes you.

Danny Hillis has a book. It’s a directory of everyone in the world who had an internet address in 1982, including the names, addresses and telephone numbers. And it was a very thin phonebook. That was the community. It was a tight community where everyone knew and trusted each other. Hillis has been a fixture […]

“I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together.” Such was the kernel of an idea from one Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer working at CERN back in the 1980s. Working on this idea was a side project for Berners-Lee, one dubbed “vague but exciting” by his boss at the […]

Nononono wrong wrong wrong (technically correct, but only due to a radical restriction on what it means to be connected)

This is only an example of those people on Arpanet — there were hordes more people with email at the time with unix ‘bang’ addresses – as I recall, mine was something on the order of mmullin!dartvax!{decvax|something|something}something………. Now, admittedly ARPA addresses were way handier, but it’s not like we went from completely disconnected to teh internetz